Stories about the meaning of life tend to work at cross-purposes with the job of actually living it, particularly when they pedal hard to activate the tear ducts. Mike Flanagan’s science-fiction life affirmer The Life of Chuck—adapted from a Stephen King novella—is an ambitious little film that has already earned some laurels: it was an audience favorite at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, winning the People’s Choice Award. Thanks to a few key moments, and the strength of its actors, it’s easy to see why audiences would warm to the film. But if you’re immune to its charms, you won’t be alone. From its cute-fake soundstage-town setting to the authoritative yet chummy voice-over narration (courtesy of Nick Offerman), The Life of Chuck works doggedly to give you the warm fuzzies—and a little bit of that fuzz goes a long way.
The story is ingeniously—or pretentiously, depending on your mood—constructed to unspool backward, beginning with the third act and ending with the first. In the opening section, Chiwetel Ejiofor plays schoolteacher Marty, whose class is interrupted just as his students are digging into Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” particularly its key phrase “I contain multitudes.” A student gasps: she’s just seen the news on her phone that part of California has fallen into the ocean. Then the internet shuts down altogether, possibly for good—the end times are near, maybe, and the world is getting ready. Marty sees a weird billboard, featuring a smiling man in a business suit and the words charles krantz, 39 great years!, and thanks chuck! (The missing comma in that last phrase is presumably just one of the mysteries of life.) Marty doesn’t know who Chuck is, nor does anyone he asks. But this billboard, followed by other mysterious Chuck references, may hold the key to the end of the world.
In the second act, we find out exactly who Chuck is: a pleasant accountant, played by Tom Hiddleston. And in the third—which is to say the first and final act—we learn Chuck’s backstory, how he was orphaned at a young age and sent to live with his grandparents, Mark Hamill’s gruff but kind bookkeeper Albie and his sensible but joyful homemaker wife Sarah, played by Mia Sara. Sarah loves to dance, and she teaches young Chuck—at this point played by an appealing child actor named Benjamin Pajak—her best moves. He’s a natural, though something is holding him back. And he too will study that Walt Whitman poem: it will shape not only his destiny, but also that of the world.
Because The Life of Chuck is based on a Stephen King story, all that heavy-duty supernatural pondering just comes with the territory. The problem is that Flanagan—known for eerie but subtle horror films like Hush and Oculus and Netflix series like Midnight Mass and The Haunting of Hill House—puts too many overly earnest quotation marks around what should be the most moving scenes. The score becomes grand and syrupy whenever there’s a big emotional revelation; characters deliver solemn soliloquies on the orderly beauty of math. The Life of Chuck explores the joys and sorrows of a life well lived in the most precious way—though Hiddleston and Ejiofor succeed somewhat in counterbalancing the mawkishness. Ejiofor explains Carl Sagan’s Cosmic Calendar with a Shakespearean authority that makes every word matter. And Hiddleston, in the second section, has an extended dance number that momentarily sends the movie soaring. As a street drummer (Taylor Gordon, also known as the Pocket Queen) beats out a fascinatin’ rhythm, Hiddleston’s Chuck taps, whirls, and moonwalks through a spontaneous routine that, for as long as it lasts, almost manages to connect you with the meaning of life. He’s the spirit of Gene Kelly reincarnated in a regulation accountant’s gray suit; when he’s in motion, The Life of Chuck really is transcendent.